ASIYA’S day starts at 5.30am. She says her prayers, cooks breakfast for her family, and a curry for dinner, wakes up her three children, feeds them, sends them to school, and then cleans her one-room rented accommodation in a shanty town of Karachi. She leaves home at 9am to work as a domestic helper, and gets back by 6pm. Then onwards, household chores keep her occupied.

Her husband doesn’t have a job since they moved from south Punjab to Karachi. Yet, she is the one doing double duty, managing her home and wearing a second hat as the family’s sole breadwinner.

“Time for myself? Never thought about it,” she says. Her monthly salary is Rs20,000 ($150).

Across a few roads where more affluent Karachiites reside lives Saima (name changed) who earns six times as much as Asiya, her monthly salary as an assistant manager at a multinational firm touching Rs120,000 ($900), more than what her husband earns. Yet Saima’s routine is pretty similar to Asiya’s. In addition she is a caretaker to her elderly mother-in-law once she is back from work.

UNDP’s human development report highlights that care work, mostly undertaken by women, is what enables a majority of the paid work which drives economies. Yet, as it is unpaid, it is under-documented and taken for granted. According to a recent report by the International Labour Organisa­tion (ILO), globally women perform 76.2 per cent of total hours of unpaid care work, more than three times as much as men.

In Asia and the Pacific, this rises to 80pc, where women spend 4.1 times more time in unpaid care work than men. Around the world, women spend two to 10 times more time on unpaid care work than men. Countries have valued unpaid care work between 15 and 39pc of national GDP.

At the recent United Nations World Data Forum 2018 hosted by the UAE government, Gender Data remained at the forefront of discussion as more than 2000 academics, statisticians, and activists from both the public and private sectors globally sat down to discuss the impact of data, especially Gender Data. Data2X, led by the United Nations Foundation, is a key organisation among Gender Data initiatives, and defines Gender Data as “data that is disaggregated by sex (e.g. school enrollment by sex), as well as data that pertains specifically to women and girls (e.g. maternal mortality rates). This data is critical to determining the size and nature of social and economic problems, the causes and consequences of those problems, how to design policies to combat them, and the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of those policies”.

While the Pakistan government strives to get over its economic crises and the subsequent cost on human development, half of the country’s population — women — and data related to their needs and their economic contribution remains mostly missing.

Women’s rights proponents like Ume Laila Azhar, Executive Director of Home Net Pakistan, highlight these issues at the policy level.

“If women are counted in statistics, their work must be counted too,” she says. Ms Azhar adds that in the Human Development Index, if women are not recorded in the labour participation figures, it shows low female participation. “If the numbers of women in the work force appear to be too small, women are not considered at the policy level — policies that translate into job opportunities or initiatives for skill development for women,” she says.

Time Use Surveys (TUS), an important tool in this regard, measure how, on an average, people spend their 24 hours in what activities. “TUS are the best instrument to measure unpaid care work, since they measure the time people spent on this work,” says Mayra Buvinic, senior fellow at Data2X and an internationally recognised expert on gender and development. Linking the dots of TUS to the evaluation of unpaid work, Ms Buvinic says that by assigning a value to unpaid care work, “you make this work visible to policymakers who design policies to increase labour force participation rates and provide social services, including paid care services”. “Unpaid care needs to be factored in the design of these policies since it conflicts with labour force participation and it provides an estimate of the need for child and elder care,” she adds.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target to improve women’s lives by encouraging their economic participation and financial inclusion. Gender Data is an important tool in the achievement of the SDGs.

A recent tweet by philanthropist Shaniera Akram resonated with the twitterati where she mentioned how women’s multi-tasking and contribution is undervalued. Speaking with Dawn, Ms Akram says that women are often overworked and under-appreciated, not just in Pakistan but all over the world.

“Women can’t be taken for granted anymore. Men can’t just take all the credit, especially when the women — mother, daughter or wife — are taking care of everything behind the scenes,” she says, suggesting that society will benefit from incentivising staying home and taking care of children, the elderly and sick or disabled relatives, with a domestic allowance for women.

“We must focus on getting to a point where women don’t just have the right but also the choice between wanting to stay at home and going into the formal work force,” she adds.

“When families in rural Sindh or Punjab work on lands of landlords with tenancy arrangements, the whole household is working — including the women and children — whose contribution isn’t counted,” points out Ms Azhar. Rural women do a lot of unpaid work like growing vegetables for food sustenance, looking after cattle and milking cows, doing not double but triple duties.

“A woman overworking is a form of exploitation, and she doesn’t get the respect and acknowledgement she deserves for her contribution,” she says.

The author is a freelance writer and her work can be seen at chaaidaani.­wordpress.com

Published in Dawn, November 12th, 2018